Case Study: The Thirty Years' War
Reading:
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For this case study you are to analyze Chapter 15 Seventeenth-Century Crisis and Rebuilding (Pgs. 464 - 469) and review the sources provided below. You are expected to be able to answer the guiding question in full depth with specific historical evidence and supporting details.
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The Defenestration of Prague of 1618 (from the Latin word fenestra meaning window) refers to the ejection of two Catholic Imperial officials and their secretary out of the Prague Castle's window by the Bohemian Protestant nobles. Although no one got hurt in the incident, the act of the Bohemian Protestants was a clear signal to King of Bohemia and the future Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II that they insist on religious freedom granted to them by the Letter of Majesty.
The Defenestration of Prague of 1618, also known as the Second Defenestration of Prague (the first took place on July 30, 1419, and provoked the Hussite Wars) was the event that triggered the devastating Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). On May 23, 1618, the Bohemian Protestants stormed the Prague Castle and threw two Catholic Imperial officials and their secretary out of the castle’s window for violating the Letter of Majesty that was issued by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II in 1609 and granted religious freedom to the Bohemian Protestants.
The event that led to the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War was provoked by closure of two Protestant churches that were built in the towns of Broumov (German: Braunau) and Hrob (German: Klostergrab). The protest against the closure of the churches was rejected and in response, the Protestant nobles threw the Imperial governors, Jaroslav Martinic and William Slavata as well as their secretary out of the window of the Prague Castle. All three survived the fifty-foot (fifteen-meter) fall without major injuries (they landed on a pile of dung) but the tensions between the Protestants and Catholics continued, not only in Bohemia but the entire Holy Roman Empire reaching their height with the election of ultracatholic Ferdinand II (King of Bohemia since June 5, 1617) as Holy Roman Emperor in 1619.
On May 27, 1619, the Bohemian Estates declared Ferdinand II deposed as King of Bohemia and elected Frederick V, Elector Palatine who came to be known as the Winter King due to his short reign. A few months later, they refused to accept Frederick II as Holy Roman Emperor which resulted in Imperial military intervention against Bohemia in autumn 1620. The Imperial Army aided by the Catholic League decisively defeated the rebel Bohemian Protestant forces in the Battle of the White Mountain on November 8, 1620. The Winter King fled to Holland, while the leaders of the Bohemian revolt were publicly executed in Prague in 1621. The victorious Holy Roman Emperor reestablished his authority in Bohemia and ordered re-Catholicization. The war against his Protestant opponents in the Holy Roman Empire, however, continued and by the end of the 1620s the tide of the Thirty Years’ War began to turn against the Habsburg Emperor.
The Defenestration of Prague of 1618, also known as the Second Defenestration of Prague (the first took place on July 30, 1419, and provoked the Hussite Wars) was the event that triggered the devastating Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). On May 23, 1618, the Bohemian Protestants stormed the Prague Castle and threw two Catholic Imperial officials and their secretary out of the castle’s window for violating the Letter of Majesty that was issued by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II in 1609 and granted religious freedom to the Bohemian Protestants.
The event that led to the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War was provoked by closure of two Protestant churches that were built in the towns of Broumov (German: Braunau) and Hrob (German: Klostergrab). The protest against the closure of the churches was rejected and in response, the Protestant nobles threw the Imperial governors, Jaroslav Martinic and William Slavata as well as their secretary out of the window of the Prague Castle. All three survived the fifty-foot (fifteen-meter) fall without major injuries (they landed on a pile of dung) but the tensions between the Protestants and Catholics continued, not only in Bohemia but the entire Holy Roman Empire reaching their height with the election of ultracatholic Ferdinand II (King of Bohemia since June 5, 1617) as Holy Roman Emperor in 1619.
On May 27, 1619, the Bohemian Estates declared Ferdinand II deposed as King of Bohemia and elected Frederick V, Elector Palatine who came to be known as the Winter King due to his short reign. A few months later, they refused to accept Frederick II as Holy Roman Emperor which resulted in Imperial military intervention against Bohemia in autumn 1620. The Imperial Army aided by the Catholic League decisively defeated the rebel Bohemian Protestant forces in the Battle of the White Mountain on November 8, 1620. The Winter King fled to Holland, while the leaders of the Bohemian revolt were publicly executed in Prague in 1621. The victorious Holy Roman Emperor reestablished his authority in Bohemia and ordered re-Catholicization. The war against his Protestant opponents in the Holy Roman Empire, however, continued and by the end of the 1620s the tide of the Thirty Years’ War began to turn against the Habsburg Emperor.
Key Concept:
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Guiding Question - Skill: Continuity and Change over Time
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Source:
European Wars, 1500 – 1763
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The Italian Wars: 1494 – 1559 (Italian city-states, Papacy, Habsburg armies v. France) Dutch wars of Independence: 1579 – 1648 (Provinces of Northern Netherlands v. Spain) Thirty Years’ War: 1618 – 1648 (States of Holy Roman Empire [Bohemia v. Palatinate], Sweden v. H.R.E, France v. Austrian Habsburg Empire |
English Civil War: 1642 – 1651 (England [Parliamentary v. Royalist forces], Scotland) War of Spanish Succession: 1701 – 1714 (France v. Spain, England, Netherlands) Seven Years’ War: 1756 – 1763 (Spain, France, England, Netherlands, Prussia, Austria) |
Source 1: Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990 – 1990, Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990
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War
Why did wars occur at all? The central, tragic fact is simple: coercion works; those who apply substantial force to their fellows get compliance, and from that compliance draw the multiple advantages of money, goods, deference, access to pleasures denied to less powerful people. Europeans followed a standard war provoking logic: everyone who controlled substantial coercive means tried to maintain a secure area within which they could enjoy the returns from coercion, plus a fortified buffer zone, possible run at a loss, to protect a secure area. Police or their equivalent deployed force in the secure area, while armies patrolled the buffer zone and ventured outside it; the most aggressive princes, such as Louis XIV, shrank the buffer zone to a thin but heavily-armed frontier, while their weaker or more pacific neighbors relied on larger buffers and waterways. Some conditions for war varied, however. Every state's particular brand of war making depended on three closely-related factors: the character of its major rivals, the external interests of its dominant classes, and the logic of the protective activity in which rulers engaged on behalf of their own and dominant classes' interests. |
Source 2: Margaret King, Western Civilization: A Social and Cultural History, Calmann & King, 2000
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Power and Gunpowder
…The advent of guns clinched the triumph of infantry over cavalry. Basically, the gun is an iron tube in which gunpowder – a mixture of potassium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoal – is exploded to fire a missile. The Chinese and the Arabs had used gunpowder since the eighth century, mainly for fireworks. The Mongols who attacked Sung Chinese fortifications early in the thirteenth century exploded gunpowder-packed bamboo stalks, the ancestor of the first guns. When Mongol armies swung westward to Poland and Hungary in 1240, Europeans first experienced the deadly might of gunfire. Soon European ironworkers – who honed their skills making swords and horseshoes, metal plowshares and great church bells – learned to manufacture guns. In the short run, guns promoted the creation of tougher suits of armor for mounted knights. In the long run, they spelled the death of knighthood. No cavalry force could withstand the direct assault of a battery of guns, although as late as the twentieth century some were still trying to. Ordinary foot soldiers armed with better and better guns formed the heart of the modern army, replacing mounted warriors as these had once replaced the ancient legion and phalanx. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ranks of arquebusiers (long-rifled musketeers) surrounded a core of pikemen (soldiers armed with long spears). In the eighteenth, lines or columns of musketeers – their more accurate weapons fitted with bayonets which made the pike obsolete – fired in unison, in precise rhythm on command, to halt an enemy charge. At first, guns could not fire straight or very far. The main use of the new weaponry was in big guns, used to batter down gates and walls. Huge cannon, finely adorned by the talents of engravers and sculptors, were dragged by beasts or before the besieged town or castle. Firing ball after ball, they eventually breached the defenses. The greedy horde of soldiers then swarmed in to sack, rape, and burn. Although the development of land warfare was crucial, much of the fighting took place at sea. Europe’s expanding dominion in the world, linked together by oceans and rivers, owed much to its naval power. Here, too, firepower proved its value, giving European navies an incontestable advantage over those of other civilizations precisely when the stakes of ship borne commerce peaked. Cannon mounted on shipboard or below deck could defend merchant convoys or fight all-out naval battles. War and Diplomacy The eighteenth-century army centered on an infantry force armed with smoothbore muskets, which were transformed into spears by affixing a sharp dagger or bayonet. The infantry faced an enemy who had already been ravaged by artillery teams with mobile, increasingly accurate cannon. Salaried soldiers wore centrally-issued uniforms, slept in barracks, and drilled regularly the maneuvers that they would be called upon to perform in battle. Officers of noble origin learned the art of command at military academies such as those in Paris, Saint Petersburg, or Turin. Battle itself – unlike the whirling charges of mounted warriors or the relentless pressure of siege—was a formal, choreographed event in which two bodies of men faced each other across an open field and fired precisely on command. Then as now, talk was the main alternative to war. By the fourteenth century, especially in Flanders and Italy, the role of the medieval herald, who conveyed messages from one leader to another, was beginning to develop into that of the modern ambassador. Like the herald, the ambassador represented a state or ruler at courts or assemblies of another. He brought information; conveyed messages of sympathy or congratulations for deaths, births, and weddings; and presented terms for the settlement of disputes. |
Source 3: R. R. Palmer, Joel Colton, and Lloyd Kramer, A History of the Modern World, 9th ed. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002), pp. 146-147.
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The Idea of the Balance of Power
It will be useful to explain what a balance of power was and was not meant to be. The phrase itself, which came into use at this time, has been employed ever since in different though related senses. In one sense it refers to a condition of equilibrium, or of even balance, in which power is distributed among many separate states. The second sense arises when this equilibrium is disturbed. If one state preponderates, and if others then form a coalition against it, then the coalition itself may be called the "balance," though it is actually the counterweight by which balance or equilibrium is to be restored. In a third sense one speaks of "holding" or "controlling" the balance of power; here the balance refers to that decisive increment of weight or power which one state may bring to bear. Thus if a state is a vitally necessary member of a coalition, more needed by its allies than it is in need of them, it may be said to "hold" the balance. Or if it belongs to no coalition at all, so that its own intervention on one side or the other would become decisive, it may also be said to "hold" the balance, although strictly speaking not participating in the balance at all. Motives for alliances The aim of statesmen pursuing policies of balance of power in the seventeenth_ and eighteenth centuries was generally to preserve their own independence of action to the utmost. Hence the basic rule was to ally against any state threatening domination. If one state seemed to dictate too much, others would shun alliance with it unless they were willing (from ideological sympathy or other reasons) to become its puppets. They would seek alliance with the other weaker states instead. They would thus create a balance or counterweight, or "restore the balance," against the state whose ascendancy they feared. Another more subtle reason for preferring alliance with the weak rather than with the strong was that in such an alliance the leaders of each state could believe their own contribution to be necessary and valued, and by threatening to withdraw their support could win consideration of their own policies. Indeed, the balance of power may be defined as a system in which each state tends to throw its weight where it is most needed, so that its own importance may. be enhanced. The purpose of balance-of-power politics was not to preserve peace but to preserve thee, or the "liberties of Europe," as they were called, against potential aggressors. The system was effective as a means to this end in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Combinations were intricate, and alliances were readily made and unmade to deal with emerging situations. One reason for the effectiveness of the system lay in the great number of states capable of pursuing an independent foreign policy. These included not only the greater and middle-sized states of Austria, Spain, France, England, Holland. Sweden, and Bavaria, but a great number of small independent states, such as Denmark, the German principalities, Portugal after 1640, and Savoy, Venice, Genoa, and Tuscany. States moved easily from one alliance to another or from one side of the balance to another. They were held back by no ideologies or sympathies especially after the religious wars subsided, but could freely choose or reject allies, aiming only to protect their own independence or enlarge their own interests. Moreover, owing to the military technology of the day, small states might count as important military partners in war. |